the Text Only Internet tool

Hosting problems

Apologies to everyone who’s experienced problems with Textise today. It looks like my hosting company, WebHost4Life (yeah, ironic name), has messed up my config again. The home page and other HTML pages are fine but the underlying web service is broken, which is why you’ll get an error if you try to convert any pages.

I raised a ticket on them at about 10:00 UK time and have received one reply saying they’re looking into it, but the site is still broken.

I’ll continue chasing. Apologies again.

Update 17:27 GMT: Used Live Chat to request an update. Their first response was to ask me to empty my cache. This didn’t go down well. Finally convinced them to test it properly and they identified what seems like a permissions error, obviously introduced at their end. Threatened to move my business elsewhere but I don’t expect that to make any difference. They’re investigating.

Update 22:25 GMT: Chatted again and received sympathy but not much else. I pointed out that, at that point, my ticket had been open for 10 hours and the site is still unusable. The ticket’s been open for over 12 hours now and still nothing. I’m going to bed now in the hope they might pull their fingers out while I sleep. Many apologies again. I’ll update in the morning.

Update Sun 27/10 10:58 GMT: Latest activity on the ticket reports no problem at the hosting company’s end, in spite of the fact that I’ve now told them a billion times that I’ve made no changes since September and the site was fine on Friday. I’ve done some more digging and it looks like the page that calls the web service is getting a 403 Forbidden response. I’ve changed Textise’s error message in the hope it might reduce user frustration. Next thing – back on the chat so they can advise me to clear my cache again.

Update Sun 27/10 13:35: No news I’m afraid. As a test, I’ve set up a new directory for the web service, deployed to it, configured it as an application, waited for an hour (effect not immediate), modified Textise to use the new web service, re-deployed Textise, tested it and… still get the error. Not sure what to do next, tbh. Waiting for a response from Webhost4life…

Update 28/10 08:13 GMT: Textise is now back. The ticket was updated at about 05:00 GMT this morning. No explanation, though, so I will be going back to them to find out what exactly happened. Many apologies, once again, for this outage. Rest assured I will now be seriously looking for more dependable hosting.